My name is Aaron Blair, I'm downtown city manager for City of Albany and today I want to talk about some initiatives that we have going on downtown Albany, as well as the business environment and some things to look for from us in 2012.

One of the major things that we had been doing is we have a partnership with the community in economic development, in the city to have a retail incubator program. This program, basically, is to help with rent prices in downtown, to help new businesses or relocating businesses in downtown, to help reduce their rent for an 18 month period.

Basically, you have to apply for it to begin in this program and if you are accepted in the program, it would help with your rent for that 18 month period. It's just an initiative we've done to kind of help reduce some of the cost, some start up cost for people who may think that taking a chance from downtown is something that may or may not be a good thing for their business, but it will help mitigate their risk in downtown right now.

Some of the things that we're working on is creating a better business environment downtown just the physical state of downtown has to be stronger than it has been in the past. We have to portray ourselves as one of the nicest, cleanest environments in the city and in the region

You'll see throughout 2012 and the end of this year some improvements on some of the streetscape, improving some of our pedestrian access for crossing the street. We're really focusing on making the pedestrian the key person in the city for downtown. So, when you get down here as far as walking and movement, crossing the roads and city now the sidewalks.

That's going to be our key improvement that you'll see from us, creating some patio scene areas so that outdoor dining kind of explode a little bit more in downtown, which will set us apart from most places within the city, and that's what you would expect from us downtown.

You will be able to sit down street‑side café and eat, that's what we're going to do. We have a new website that was produced actually by downtown merchant, danieltitus.com. It's dtownalbany.com and it's very similar to our Facebook and Twitter as DtownAlbany. That's how you can find us. We're at DtownAlbany.